| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: you in a cellar, you turn to the back-window of a grimy
tenement in a lane:- and behold! you are face-to-face
with distant and bright prospects. You turn a corner,
and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills.
You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the
Baltic.
For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-
tops, is one thing; it is another for the citizen, from
the thick of his affairs, to overlook the country. It
should be a genial and ameliorating influence in life; it
should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: cote son belveder different. Again, when Europe woke to a
sense, an almost exaggerated and certainly uncritical
sense, of the value of her songs of the people, of all the
ballads that Herder, Scott, Lonnrot, and the rest
collected, it was commonly said that Homer was a
ballad-minstrel, that the translator must imitate the
simplicity, and even adopt the formulae of the ballad.
Hence came the renderings of Maginn, the experiments of Mr.
Gladstone, and others. There was some excuse for the error
of critics who asked for a Homer in ballad rhyme. The Epic
poet, the poet of gods and heroes, did indeed inherit some
The Odyssey |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare: Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give:
So should that beauty which you hold in lease
Find no determination; then you were
Yourself again, after yourself's decease,
When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold,
Against the stormy gusts of winter's day
And barren rage of death's eternal cold?
O! none but unthrifts. Dear my love, you know,
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Apology by Xenophon: impending trial, he roundly put it to him whether he ought not to be
debating the line of his defence, to which Socrates in the first
instance answered: "What! do I not seem to you to have spent my whole
life in meditating my defence?" And when Hermogenes asked him, "How?"
he added: "By a lifelong persistence in doing nothing wrong, and that
I take to be the finest practice for his defence which a man could
devise." Presently reverting to the topic, Hermogenes demanded: "Do
you not see, SOcrates, how often Athenian juries[8] are constrained by
arguments to put quite innocent people to death, and not less often to
acquit the guilty, either through some touch of pity excited by the
pleadings, or that the defendant had skill to turn some charming
The Apology |
